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You can’t ask me that: Do you really want to live forever?

Do you want to live forever? For the past century, it seems the chances you might have been increasing. There are more than seven times as many centenarians today than there were in the 1980s. Rudi Westendorp, professor of old-age medicine at the University of Copenhagen, recently suggested that a future 135-year-old had already been born.

We’ve long since breached the 120-year mark. That was with Jeanne Calment, who was 122 years and 164 days old when she died in 1997. Though Calment was deaf, blind and confined to a wheelchair, she said on the occasion of her final birthday, “I dream, I think, I go over my life, I never get bored.”

The French, it seems, are particularly good at living a long time. A baby born in France today has a one in two chance of hitting a century. Time to put cabernet sauvignon in the sippy cup? Alas, non.